hello i'm tom hartman in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on a special edition of the big picture with c.e.o. pay ballooning and worker wages plummeting it's never been tougher for the american worker so what's next for the labor movement and just how rich is too rich a last teamsters president james hoffa and later in the show is my discussion on wealth in america with austin peterson and richard esko and then we'll take a look back at my conversation with the religious scholar reason on the true story behind the greatest story ever told the life of jesus of nazareth and f.y.r. my new book the crash of twenty sixteen plot to destroy america and what we can do

to stop it is now available for preorder at all online retailers like amazon dot com and your local bookstore so go check it out. in screwed news right now giant transnational corporations are doing everything they can to screw over the working class by putting profits ahead of the well being of their employees take wal-mart for example america's largest corporation makes nearly thirty five thousand dollars in profit a minute as of two thousand and twelve its annual average sale stood at four hundred five billion dollars if the average hourly pay for a wal-mart associate is eighty dollars and eighty one cents of every annual paid a little over fifteen thousand dollars which is sixteen percent below the two thousand and eleven federal poverty guideline for a family of three wal-mart isn't alone in its abuse of the working class from other

big box retail stores to a. because largest fast food chains the working classes are earning less and less while corporate profits are getting larger and larger fortunately the working class has wised up to the games that corporate america is playing and is fighting back against profit driven corporate tyranny joining me now for more on the global revolution against poverty is james hoffa general president of the international brotherhood of teachers teamsters. almost change your profession there sir i see a tirade to have you with this president what is the state of working america right across the globe right now workers are suppressed we see what's going on what's happened since two thousand and ten we see right to work in michigan right to work in indiana we see basically a full court press against workers to keep their wages down to take away their power and you touched on the fact of what's called globalization globalization is another word to move by job to mexico if that's globalization and we know what it

is and basically we're losing good jobs in this country in the old days you could work in a factory you could work at a machine shop you could sweep some place out and those jobs are gone and urban areas and basically every word in this country there are less jobs today than ever before and less people are working and what's happened is that wages have stagnated despite the fact that we have inflation so it means people have gone backwards so what do we see people having one job to job three jobs trying to survive in america that's why you have this building up of this frustration that you're start to see on television but one of the problems i think we have is the media doesn't cover it when there is a plant closing and thousands of people lose their job do you see a.b.c. n.b.c. they're not there is not a it's not it is not new when a plant closes down and moves to mexico in three four hundred people are thrown out of their jobs it's not new but it affects them like never before maytag new.

they closed their plant down thousands of people lost their job i don't remember that being on the news and these are the kind of things we should be focusing on to where raise the awareness about what's really going on in this country that are good jobs are leaving this country and what's left is the hamburger flipping jobs that we talked about you know that's the only thing that's left is maybe you know working at mcdonald's or burger king or wal-mart for eight bucks an hour that's not a job and you can't support a family well and there seems to have been a fundamental shift in our lifetimes and certainly in the last thirty years i say post reagan in one. we perceive the value of labor in my father's generation there was the idea in fact i remember the old jackie gleason show you know jackie gleason was a bus driver his best friend worked in the sewers the lucy show i mean all those shows from the fifty's and sixty's they were middle class people and the idea was that if you're working as a bus driver you're working in the sewers or you're working with dolls or you work

in a store you should be able to earn enough to raise a family that there is a bottom baseline that there's a value to labor and since since reagan since the reagan revolution it's almost been like well if you don't get a college education if you don't you know something like that than than the value the value of it wavers so low that it and. how did that change happen and how do we flip that back how do we start that conversation about labor having its own intrinsic dignity even if it's sweeping floors well that's a big job and what it is i agree with you when i grew up in the sixty's and seventy's and even in the early part of the eighty's i mean you know one guy could have a good job and he could support his family couldn't get to college have a nice home have a car and live a good life in america that's gone now people are working harder and harder to survive yes there are some good jobs we have a lot of teamsters who have good jobs but we're only one small part of a huge market and there are millions of people out there that don't. belong to our

union or belong to organized labor and they're struggling out there and they're basically out there because the good jobs have left the jobs in the old days when you could always get a job at the x.y.z. company they're hiring you don't hear that anymore no one's hiring and what do you end up you end up flipping hamburgers at mcdonald's and that's not a job and that's the problem we have right now we need to have more good jobs and that's why when we start talking about rebuilding our infrastructure well there is an idea there is an idea where we could have federal funds we all know that our bridges are falling down we know our roads are falling apart we know that everything else is falling apart on the highways and we've got to fix them. that's a good place where a guy can work for good wages and he can be out there working every day out in the sunlight making a good wage and supporting his family who's fighting that right now we have people in this town washington d.c. that say all we shouldn't do that we shouldn't pick sideways and we shouldn't have people getting good wages fixing that thing that's the opposite of what we should

be doing but with the jobs that's that are left even the burger flipping jobs that used to be that those rancher level jobs used to be the teenagers did that now the average age of somebody working at mcdonald's is twenty eight years old these are these are adults these are people that they're in their prime child bearing rearing years they should be getting a good pay doesn't this also argue for at least a raise the minimum wage and ideally unionization in the service sector what exactly what what we're seeing now is the people working at mcdonald's can't find another a better job but they could find a better job they wouldn't be at mcdonald's and many people are in you know flint michigan detroit michigan downtown in manhattan and you know they wish they had a job because a lot of people have families and like you said these are not kids these are not seventeen year old kids like in the old days worked there for the summer that's not what's going on today it's completely different these people are adults many of them have children they want health care they need to have

a job and there. to work forty hours and what do we run run into with mcdonald's and they say well you can work twenty one hours you can work twenty schedule for twenty one hours just enough that you can survive and even in forty hours you couldn't make it you know eight nine ten dollars an hour you can't live on four hundred dollars a month you can't support a family by the time you do the deed auction you're getting three hundred dollars so what's wrong is we should have a higher minimum wage in australia it's sixteen dollars is your economy so different than ours and the answer is we should do something like that when that when you have higher wages like that higher minimum wage higher whatever what happens the answer is everybody benefits those people go out and spend money they consume they make the whole economy go they go to the store you know they buy food they buy groceries they basically do things that make the economy work make other companies you know people around them work so it's a whole multiplier effect of money so we have to raise the minimum wage from the george washington of ministration to the ronald reagan administration if you graft

productivity and particularly even through the revolution the ability of workers to make things that make money for the employers the graft productivity and graft wages they followed each other starting in one thousand nine hundred with the reagan revolution wages flattened out and productivity kept going up leaving a big gap of money there the that there were basically the owners have been taking and it hasn't been going to the workers and why why did that happen was this just reagan's war on organized labor it's the it's the it's basically the attack that's been going on since the reagan era basically attack on organized labor attack on workers take away their power so they have to work for anything they can get and that's what we're seeing right now. you know it's common for a company to have one hundred people working and i have i know a story like this and they about fifty people go and the rest of people had to do the work of the hundred and what do you think happened there productivity i think it went up yeah yeah but they didn't get paid any more money. and they were

expected to work sixty seventy eighty hours a week no overtime just get down there you're lucky to have a job that's the attitude of people today and it is this war on workers it's a war on unions the fact is if they had power to negotiate with employers to say look at your productivity is going up why can't we participate in this why can't in my working harder than ever i'm making money for you why don't we grow together why don't we both make money together why would my productive be to productivity be rewarded with better wages they don't see it that way they have the idea you're lucky to have a job it sounds like the theme that you keep coming back to in this is that supply side economics trickle down economics didn't work and that we need to go back to the classic economics of adam smith do it with that wages create demand demand drives an economy is that that's the multiplier effect with people who have money they spend. and they go out and they have to provide for their family that money goes into the economy it goes to the local economy all that makes things work if i

spend money at your store you can pay your workers your workers that have money to go buy things it's the multiplier effect it's elementary but somehow the people that are against workers against unions don't believe in that may say well the less worker workers should get less money not more money and we believe they should get more body and be rewarded for their hard work and your productivity well and apropos of that there's the script the american legislative exchange council that was founded back in in the late seventy's in part by paul wiring the guy who famously said i don't want everybody to vote you know we win elections when we suppress the vote basically and they in addition to pushing voter suppression laws all over the united states they have been pushing right to work for less laws state after state have been becoming right to work for less states is is alec. what's a what's your perspective on alec what are your thoughts alec is one of these he evil empires that's been created by big money people that sit. we need to have

a place the church is out legislation against abortions against. the minimum wage against people being paid to write wage we should have things on right to work and they churn this out and send it out to fifty states you know in the funniest thing is we had you know some republican legislator introduced a bill that said alec at the top he forgot to cut it off i mean that actually happened i mean it's comical president james hoffa you're doing great work thank you so much for to seize.

it. that was a new alert animation scripts scare me a little bit. there is breaking news tonight and we are continuing to follow

the breaking news. alexander's family cry tears of joy and great things that had rendered in a court of law thrown on lads here's a story made sort of movies playing out in real life. you need to know this america is a billionaire is paradise and the super rich are way too rich consider these facts right now the american social structure looks more like that of a banana republic in the country thomas jefferson called an empire of liberty just four hundred megawatts of the households now all more. wealthier than sixty percent

of the entire country corporate profits are higher than they've been in over half a century and the top one percent has captured almost all the wealth created since two thousand and eight but the scariest part is that the mega rich don't even know what to do with all that money a recent study reported on by c.m. b.c. found that last quarter the savings rate of the wealthiest one percent soared to thirty seven percent in the second quarter that's up from thirty four percent in the second quarter of two thousand and twelve and more than three times their savings rate in two thousand and seven so what do the super rich do when they're not hoarding their wealth like spanish can piece that ours well they're throwing massive parties to honor themselves sean parker of napster frame for example recently trash an environmentally fragile california campground to celebrate his wedding party cost four and a half million according to reports was supposed to evoke the coronation of elizabeth the second of the billionaires like jeff these ows the mega wealthy

founder and c.e.o. of the amazon dot com empire use their spare riches for the oh so noble purpose of controlling public opinion just last week jeff who owes his fortune partly to the fact that there's no internet sales tax he got a tax loophole purchased the washington post for a whopping two hundred fifty million dollars which amounts to only about one one hundredth of his twenty two billion dollars total net worth and if you need any further proof that america's elite are really just modern day nobles consider how they control our government according to a recent analysis by the sunlight foundation a tiny one one hundredth of one percent of our population makes twenty eight percent of all campaign contributions meanwhile the rest of the american people are struggling employee share of the national income the money taken home but no class and working class people is steadily slipping in fact is now at its lowest total in over fifty years before the reagan tax cuts people could still get rich but now

we've gone. back to robber baron era levels of wealth and inequality so where is the outrage i'm joined now by richard as a senior fellow at the campaign for america's future which is hosting its twenty thirteen awards gala on november sixth or information at our future dot org and austin peterson chief executive of stone gate l.l.c. and editor editor of the libertarian republic dot com richard you just wrote an amazing piece for the for the internet about this phenomena that i just described you want to give us you had the eight things that indicate that the super rich are just way too rich but give us a snapshot of that in a minute or so sure i mean you hit on a lot of them but one of them is that billionaires like jeff bezos is a brilliantly talented guy but a lot of this wealth is being created with the government created technology like the internet and with government educated consumers and workforces and it is way in excess of what we used to see historically so you cited

a lot of the statistics in fact the top one percent in america has actually gotten one hundred twenty one percent of the economic recovery since two thousand and eight in other words they've advanced their disproportionate share since then we've seen people monopolizing in altering the political process so that it's far less democratic you mentioned sean parker's environmentally destructive and silly way in which also involved him singing a song from the little mermaid to his bride which i think should he already got fined two and a half million dollars maybe there should have been another two and a half million dollars for singing a song from the little mermaid but that's just me so we've got we've got a situation that really is killed in age plus now in terms of disproportionate wealth and i guess i conclude by saying that while someone like jeff bezos is very talented a lot of people who are billionaires nowadays really didn't do it with talent they did it more with luck and aggression. anything else so austin what is it that you

like about america becoming a banana well i love the gilded age i consider one of the best parts of american history of. over cleveland one of the best democratic presidents we've ever had and richard i read your article today very interesting and you guys seem very focused on the rich but what you're not focusing on is the fact that even though the united states does have a high disparity between the rich and the poor we also have higher incomes and more disposable income than most of our european counterparts and this is according to both mean and median measures so we're we're not skewing this for a high rise but i want to richard would say about that richard because you're very focused on the rich but think about this from the those reagan tax cuts that you mentioned from one thousand nine hundred five to one thousand nine hundred one you know the average income game for rich households was four thousand but for poor households they had a twenty eight thousand dollars gain because of those reagan tax cuts for the way that you choose this is today in the clinton justice is i'm going. to say a twenty eight thousand dollars game for a poor house i want to poor house doesn't earn twenty eight thousand dollars i

guess it's real simple actually you told us with these tax cuts for the rich we have all sorts of jobs where the jobs well i don't know ask president obama he's been in office long enough to make you take on this yes so maybe if we want to. share act we might have a better chance at the the eight hundred eighty seven state of the union address that your hero grover cleveland gave where he said when we look at the american landscape we see trusts and combinations the irony of the corporation is on the neck of the american people he was speaking out against the guild that will know i think you know that age was a period of time that was the most grinding poverty for working class i thought about it because i'm white and people who owned companies were literally shooting working people with machinery i think that what grover cleveland was anticipating was the rise of corporatism in the united states and what we have here are corporations that have captured the government and the issue here is not necessarily the corporations have too much power on their own because corporations in a free market would only have the given power. them by consumers however after the

rise of the new deal when when the economy had collapsed in the one nine hundred twenty s. and then they said that we need to have a new deal they said the corporations and government need to work together you know the the error of the of the robber barons was the last time we had a monopolistic era of the united states and post nine hundred was the second time we had a monopolistic era break the change happened after the great crash of eighty ninety eight and the rise of populism of the progressives teddy roosevelt after two great republican presidents in forcing the shuras. of republican race as i recall of both corporate and richer to this you know where yeah yeah yeah let's look you know i would have thought that we'd have allies among the libertarian community and i think here and there we do that when corporations become so powerful that they and a few wealthy individuals become so powerful that they monopolize the political process and force deregulation that allows the aggressors to buy up and drive out

of business their competitors and destroy any semblance of what we might call the free market i would have thought we'd have some libertarian thought of both sides of your head my friend ellison the corporate know they why give the i'm not the what you want you know how to run side there has been no i really wasn't around three austin don't filibuster i'm not the one talking out of both sides of my head here you either like this concentration of wealth and the corruption of our political process or you don't know i don't know that i don't like let me live in a just let me finish i said i don't you said you do explain your because the czech republic is listed as having the least don't have it in the about a little and we want to know your spirit english and listen m.j. in that in the czech republic right now the wealth disparity is the lowest it is in the world but these people are twenty seven out of thirty eight in disposable income so why don't you go live in the czech republic where they have no money to spend of goods and services but they are very close together and wealth disparity yeah you can be really close you can be poor and really close to rich here i bet if your voters have all your lives in christ and you do. to me about the czech

republic. or parity because in the united states we do have great wealth disparity and the problem is not the gap between the rich and poor the problem is that the poor get better off over time and i've explained to you sir the between nine hundred seventy one and nine hundred ninety one the poor have gotten better off the united states after all because of free market capitalism sir and you are ignoring that and you are causing the poverty that you claim to be against and you say it's deregulation but it is only one of the review regulation of these corporations that they i mean you know which one is this really am i ignoring the poverty or my cause you can't explain yourself because either is jibberish what i'm wondering which is your actual position that and that's going to be where we wrap it up i think. richard great to see. these scientists are wrong but not the way you think as global warming picks up

scientists and researchers are finally beginning to come to grips with just how very serious this problem is and how quickly we're running out of time to solve. for example when it comes to sea level and sea level increases scientists of the tory asli under estimated how fast the waters would be rising as church shows sea levels are rising much faster than the i.p.c.c. predictions these were the predictions at least two thousand and ten. over the last two decades scientists also underestimated the extent of ice melting in the arctic it's disappearing at a much faster clip than even the direst predictions again the blue line is the standard of the predictions these are the you know different sets of math predicting this and this is what's actually been observed this is where we are right now in just a few years we're going to have our first ice free arctic summer in roughly seven

hundred thousand years keep in mind human. in sixty five thousand years seven hundred thousand years before the onset of humanity on top of all of that scientists have also consistently underestimated just how much carbon dioxide we humans are dumping into the atmosphere again with actual measurements now available to us. production project projections for the last couple of decades two thousand to those five two thousand and ten this is what they were projecting the signs of the i.p.c.c. all those people that you know the right wingers are all other alarmists this is what their production projecting this is what we're actually seeing. so what's with the history of underestimation a team of researchers at the university of alberta recently published a paper in the journal global environmental change characterizing this dangerous trend of low balling estimates of global warming they note that the available

evidence suggests that scientists have in fact been conservative in their projections of the impact of climate change particularly in i.p.c.c. and assessments of the physical science scientists are not biased toward alarmism but rather the reverse toward cautious estimates we call this the tendency of error on the side of least drama and why is that happening it's simple when going up against a well funded ruthlessly powerful special interest like the fossil fuel industry scientists know that if they rock the boat too much or even appear to they might be targeted and discredited just as michael mann who is infamous hockey stick chart shows the recent extreme uptick in global temperatures since the industrial revolution and yet that's measured it's real after releasing the hockey stick graph when he was back when he was projecting that he instantly became the target of

smears and was mercilessly attacked by conservatives and fossil fuel industry shills for far too long our climate change debate has been focused on not ruffling feathers on finding economically viable solutions depending on the oil companies to lead us through an energy transition. that hasn't worked on our planet is getting hotter even quicker the latest i.p.c.c. projection shows that at least a five degrees celsius temperature increase will happen by twenty one hundred and even if countries around the world reduce carbon emissions immediately the planet will still warm over two degrees which will have catastrophic consequences for life on earth but given the history of lowballed. actions our planet could be headed for even warmer temperatures for but unfortunately over the past year some scientists have said to hell with the right wingers i want to tell the truth even if it does mean that they're going to attack me and they're right now is the time for the rest of us and our politicians to also speak back to the big money interests who don't

seem to give a damn about planet earth global warming and global climate change whatever you call it is real it's caused by us in large part and we can stop it if we act quickly enough the time for dithering is over it's time to. wealthy british style. market why not. find out what's really happening to the global economy

with mike stronger for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines. the mission. couldn't take three. years three. months three. three. three. three blown video for your media projects a free media. joining

me for tonight's conversations in the great minds is dr reza. aslan is a critically acclaimed writer and religious scholar and currently serves as an associate professor of creative writing and is cooperating faculty in the department of religion at the university of california riverside as degrees in religion from santa clara university of the university of california santa barbara and harvard university and is an adjunct senior fellow at the council on foreign relations his new book zealot the life and times of jesus of nazareth is a must read for anyone who wants to know the true story behind the greatest story ever told and joins us now from our los angeles studio thanks for thanks for being with us tonight sir it's a great pleasure thanks for having me let's start with you i'm curious what provoked you to pursue religion as a as a vocation as well as an avocation. it's funny you know i've always been interested

in religion in spirituality you i don't understand why i didn't come from a religious family at all i mean my mother is sort of culturally muslim my father is an exuberant atheist and really didn't have much religious training or education growing up but i have always been deeply interested in it i think partly it has to do with my experience of revolutionary iran my family frett fled iran in one thousand nine hundred eighty nine at the heart of the revolution and i think that those childhood images of revolutionary iran sort of seared themselves in my unconscious the power that religion has to transform the society for good and for bad is something that i think i have never forgotten and have always been deeply interested in both so. truly and as an intellectual enterprise some people are provoked into religion by virtue of the transcendental experience of some sort is is there. have you had that experience is there is there that part of your life

also that might have pushed you and mr. well absolutely i mean i sort of always wanted to have a spiritual experience but i didn't really have any kind of outlet for it when i was a teenager i went to an evangelical youth camp with some friends and that was the first time that i heard the gospel story this as you say greatest story ever told about the god of heaven and earth coming down in the form of a child sacrificing himself for our sins this was a profoundly spiritual experience for me hearing this story for the first time i converted to evangelical christianity began preaching the gospel to my friends to my family pretty much anyone who would listen to me even people who wouldn't listen to me frankly and then when i went to college to study the new testament in a more academic environment i started to notice a bit of a difference a chasm if you will between the jesus of history that i was learning about and the christ of faith that the church taught me about and although i eventually moved

away from from christianity from my christian faith i nevertheless became deeply deeply interested in jesus the man and. that led you to obviously to this book what is it about jesus the man versus jesus the savior. what is that what is the what is the point of bifurcation there. you know that's a that's actually a really really good question and the answer may not seem kind of surprising in a sense because it's obvious but the point of bifurcation is that jesus the man was a jew now obviously everybody agrees with that statement that jesus was a jew even christians believe. jesus was a jew but there are consequences to that belief what it means is that everything that jesus said or did has to be understood exclusively within the jewish context of the world in which he lived it means that the only god that he knew was the god

of the old testament the only scriptures that he was familiar with were the hebrew scriptures the only religion that he had any encounter with was ten second temple judaism but that means if that's true then how we understand what jesus said and did and what was said about jesus has to be filtered through that jewish lens and that kind of changes things it changes the way the sort of the biography of jesus that arises from from that truth then sort of the celestial spirit of christianity that jesus has become changes as. well first and foremost let's just take the central argument about jesus that he was the messiah well messiah means something very specific in the jewish context it means the descendant of king david who is you know here on earth to reestablish the kingdom of david to usher in the rule of god anybody who heard jesus say the words i am the messiah would have

understood precisely what i just told you that's what their expectations would be and by the way if you do not do those things then you are not the messiah the christian conception of messiah of course is something quite different it's a celestial sits an office that whose kingdom is not of this world but but of the kingdom of heaven indeed many christians believe that messiah is synonymous with god literally big gotten son of god no jew in jesus' time would have possibly thought that no nobody who heard jesus say i am the messiah no jew certainly would have thought what he meant was i am god that's an important us. think sion i'd like to get back to that but just a slight digression if i may you mentioned judaism was and the world of the day was the only one that jesus really knew or expose was exposed to which. raises two questions one what was the religion of the romans who surrounded interpenetrated

that area and ruled that area at the time and how might that have influenced his thinking or that of the people around him and to there has been for a long time a lot of speculation about his years between twelve and thirty one the bible is silent that perhaps he travelled people claim he traveled to india for example because some of the things that are associated with hindu metaphor metaphysics physics seem to be appearing particularly in things like the gospel of thomas i'm curious just in general your thoughts on no very good very good i mean look it's important to if you want to know who jesus was you have to know the world in which he lived i mean if jesus was a jewish tecton or woodworker as he is referred to in the gospels then that would put him at the second lowest rung of the social ladder in first century palestine just above the slave the indigent and the beggar so again what we're talking about here is someone who was very likely an illiterate an educated marginal poor peasant

from the backwoods of galilee who came from a village in nazareth that was so small so in consequential that its name does not appear on any map or document before the end of the first century even if this was a land that was dominated by the roman empire was occupied by the roman empire even if there were certainly greeks and syrians and arabs that lived in certain urban metropolis centers in the holy land a poor jewish day laborer and peasant would have very little access to these ideas or to these people for that matter and that's what we have to constantly remember is that while jesus was certainly remarkable charismatic somebody. definitely worth getting to know because of his teachings and his actions he wasn't utterly unique he was very much like all the other jews who that he grew up with and if you want to know who jesus was you need to know the world in which he grew up and in so far

as the years between twelve and thirty i would say actually it's the years between zero and thirty i mean really until jesus begins his public ministry on the banks of the jordan river everything before that is all speculation and legend from the nativity stories to the stories that come up many many years later about his travels to india etc a poor jewish illiterate an educated peasant who is barely living above subsistence level does not travel to india you know well you just said all of this is is a story. that is so in their words very specific prophecies largely in isaiah about what the messiah would do how you would identify the messiah where he would be from how he would present himself and there are some who have suggested over the years that the biography in the early biography of jesus has been reconstructed in order to match that template in that it had very little to do with

who jesus was and a large part of that is that he is this poor illiterate carpenter i mean is it possible that he wasn't a poor a litter carpenter that he was you know born into a decent family a good family was educated he had studied i mean there are some who suggest that he had been for many many years educated by these scenes for example what what might be sort of like today's costs and community. you know the people who are deeply into this stuff and very very metaphysical very into a following. what i thought all the. while the essence mostly only took in the children of priests and jesus wasn't a form of priestly family but everything. that you say is possible that's absolutely true it is possible that jesus unlike what scholars estimate to be about ninety eight percent of his fellow jews could read and write it is possible that jesus unlike what we would expect from every other day laborer an artisan of the

time was educated was extraordinary it's possible that unlike every other jew in his time his idea of what the messiah was was utterly unique and innovative those are all things that are absolutely possible but of course the job of the historian is to not talk about what's possible but the talk about what's likely and i think that's what's important to understand this by the way doesn't in any way mean an attack on faith i think all those other things that i've said about jesus which are very much a part of the christian conception of who he was are matters of faith and that's perfectly fine but we're talking about matters of history in so far as we can to have some sense of it when we're talking about ancient history like this of the matter of history is that he was a poor illiterate carpenter second on the bottom of the social and economic wrong how did he become this guy that we're still talking about two thousand years later . well i mean first of all what's remarkable about this man is that despite all the

things that i just said he was through his charisma and through the power of his social teachings able to put together a movement on behalf of the outcast the marginalized the poor the dispossessed. those that society had deemed unworthy of salvation on behalf of these people he started a movement that was seen as such a threat to the religious and political authorities of the time that he was alternately arrested and executed as a state criminal we have to remember that crucifixion was a punishment that rome reserved almost exclusively for the crime of sedition for treason crimes against the state. so if rome thought that you were such a troublemaker such over rabble rouser and revolutionary that you were worthy of execution as a state criminal that they're alone should challenge the general perception that i think a lot of of modern people have of jesus as some kind of inveterate pacifist with no

concern for the things of this world and that's. the that's an analysis that a lot of scholars have gotten into over the years a goals others who have suggested that there was actually in turn the other cheek and walk a mile in my in my. or walk and walk the extra mile or give them your cloak in your code as well really these were calls to revolution i'd like to pursue that and that whole thread with you right after this break if we made. more of tonight's conversations with great minds with a result right up to this. time

of the new alert animation scared me a little bit. there is breaking news tonight and we are continuing to follow the breaking news. alexander's family cry tears of joy and a great thing that had we had read it or if our own. is a story many movies playing out in real life. well

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a pleasure to have you with us here today. and welcome back to conversations with great minds i'm speaking with dr result internationally acclaimed writer scholar and author of the new book zealot the life and times of jesus of nazareth just a to follow on that question i asked about jesus not so much as spiritual figure although that was the subtext to everything of that day but as revolutionary. or social activist. your thoughts. well i first of all you're absolutely right about one part of this which is that in jesus' time there is no difference between religion and politics i think a lot of people have said that this book about jesus is about jesus in

a political world but for anyone who heard jesus speak i mean they would not have differentiated any of his words or his actions as being either you know social or political or or religious or political they were all considered one and the same thing but your larger point you're absolutely right i mean what i am claiming in this book is frankly in so far as biblical studies go two hundred years of the quest for the historical jesus not all that new or revolutionary many people have talked about jesus as a jewish nationalist who tried to rid the holy land of the roman occupation and failed to do so and that as a result of that failure his followers reinterpreted not just his life but the very idea of the messiah into something that was less jewish and more roman which then allowed it to be adopted by romans and then ultimately turned into the largest

religion in the world as we know it it becomes very difficult therefore to get past all of those things to that kernel of who jesus was but this is something that that scholars have been doing for many many years and i certainly stand on the on the shoulders of a lot of scholars who have done that the two that reinvention the followers of jesus the church of peter died out within a century and were replaced by the followers of paul who had never physically met jesus claim to have seen him when he was riding on a horse one day but and and modern christianity really is many would suggest more of the invention of paul even of jesus what do you what do you think about that. i think it would definitely fall into that category i mean again we have to remember that jesus's apostles his disciples his followers were very much like jesus himself farmers fishermen many of whom were from the backwoods of galilee so in other words

what juju day ins would refer to as kind of a country bumpkin these people could not read or write jesus's followers could not write about what they saw they could not read about what they saw the task of writing about jesus instead fell to the next generation of his followers who were like paul more of these were greek speaking jews hellenistic jews who lived not in the holy land but in these large cosmopolitan centers like corinth in antioch alexandria rome they were deeply influenced by roman ideas roman religion greek philosophies and as they began to adopt the gospel message of jesus they began to shift it to change it to massage it to hellenized it if you will and make it more palatable for a non jewish audience and certainly i think that one of the most important people in the first couple of generations of jesus' followers to do that

was paul paul who never knew jesus of nazareth never met jesus never really says anything about the historical jesus i think there are only three things about jesus' life that are ever mentioned in any of paul's writings the crucifixion obviously the resurrection and the last supper which he turns into a literal jackal formula paul never quotes anything that jesus says and that's because paul didn't know jesus when he was alive paul's experience of jesus is as he refers to in the risen jesus the eternal jesus and paul crafts jesus. into something else something unique something that i and a lot of scholars who agree with me would say. was utterly jewish now many scholars disagreed they say that paul's idea was you know floating around in judaism at the time that may very well be the case but we can never forget that paul is the man who said that christ is the end of the torah that means that for paul christ is

a divorce from judaism which probably would have sounded a little odd to jesus himself who was again a jew it's a fascinating perspective in matthew twenty five one of the great instructional. speeches by jesus where he talks about how you know the disciples come to him and say how do i get into heaven and he said you know in the last days i'll be sitting here judging the nations separating the girls from the sheep and the good sheep are going to go up to heaven the good goats are going to go off to hell and and the criteria will be did you feed me when i was hungry did you heal me when i was sick did you visit me when i was in the prison did you you know and so on clothed me when i was naked i guess the modern equivalent to housed me when i was homeless and you know the disciples kind of freak out because they've never seen him hungry and they go oh we're screwed you know we're doomed we're not going to go to heaven you know. how can you say that and he said well as you are the least of these among the

most so you know among you you've done on to me i mean it's that part of it's fairly famous the part of it that has always. had me scratching my head and you're the exactly the person i want to ask this question of because you understand this and you know about the translation of differences nothing else is modern day christians typically take this in the most personal of sense that jesus is talking to an individual or at the most to his twelve disciples and he was saying you must feed the poor you must and they use it to pitch individual responsibility for charity and yet when you read it he said in the last days i will be judging the nations was he was he saying. i mean that communities have responsibility for for feeding the hungry or was he or was that just a missed speaker a mistranslation or what why nations why not i will be judging individuals well

because judaism in so far as jesus's conception of its second temple judaism is not an individual to stick religion it's a communal religion it's about the nation of israel that's how the jews would have thought it certainly how jesus would have thought and more to the point you know this message that jesus is is preaching in that in that wonderful verse is the very core and kernel of jesus's ministry the reversal of the social order we always for we always remember the nice parts about the beatitudes right you know blessid are the meek for they shall inherit the earth blessid are the poor for they shall be made wealthy blessid or the hungry for they shall be fed we forget the second part of the beatitudes which is world to the rich for they shall be made poor walled to the fed for they shall be made hungry what jesus is referring to here is not just some utopian world you know what he's talking about is the

a stark reversal of the social order wherein the rich will be made poor the poor we will be made rich the last will be first the first will be last now you can understand why this message of his would be simultaneously enormously appealing to those who are poor and hungry and incredibly threatening to those who are rich and well fed it explains i think a lot how these teachings were seen as so revolutionary and frankly so threatening that it would result in his death so would you to the specific question would you suggest that. a better lesson today to take from matthew. twenty five you and i individually should be giving money to the local food bank would be that we should be if we are genuinely christians we should be lobbying our elected representatives to make the food bank available to anybody who is hungry. if you

are someone who claims to walk in the footsteps of jesus to imitate jesus regardless of whether you think that he is god or just a man then your primary concern has to be precisely the reversal of the social order i mean jesus is message from beginning to end is about equality not individual striving for equality but equality for all peoples now when jesus said all peoples he meant the nation of israel but two thousand years later of course we need to think about what the nation actually means this is something that i think is very very important i'm so glad that we're talking about it because as you know there are many people in the us certainly who claim to speak for jesus politicians religious leaders and i think that word jesus alive today where he just suddenly show up today i think that his primary mission would be precisely

to attack to go after those who most claim to speak for him while. strong stuff any or if i if i may digress a bit in your book no god but god the origins evolution and future of islam your previous book you talked about mohammad as an economic and social reformer two are there parallels between him and jesus in that regard. there are the interesting thing of course is that while both of them preach a social message of economic equality this is at the core of i think both of their of their message that jesus preached it from a position of extreme poverty whereas mohammad preached it from a position of of well what we would refer to i guess as kind of an upper middle class. in in our terms so same message different perspectives and it's interesting to note you know where that strength comes from how the how the message itself changes depending on the social position of the one preaching it. and you

also suggested that islam is sort of going through or might be going through a bit of a reformation right now as christianity went through many centuries ago. updated thoughts on. well the reformation of course what we mean is individualization reformations are a universal phenomenon that all great religions go through as they constantly battle between institutions and individuals over who gets to define the faith the great christian reformation of the sixteenth century was primarily that argument is it the church that gets to say what christianity means or is it the individual as the protestants declared that argument has been taking place in islam for more than a century indeed a great deal of what's going on right now with the turmoil in the arab spring in the post arab spring is precisely a part of this notion there is a vast majority of muslims who are tired of being told what islam means by these

great institutions that claim to speak for god and the more they begin to interpret islam for themselves for good and for bad for peace and for violence for democracy and for authoritarianism that's the thing about individual interpretations is that it relies on your own personal viewpoints the more you're going to see this eruption of conflict in this region i mean you know reformations as i write in no god but god are messy affairs the reformation of christianity led to the thirty years war and the death of over a half the population of germany alone we should not be surprised that that same thing is happening now in islam remarkable dr oz. thank you so much for being with us tonight. my pleasure thank you for having me and thank you for writing a remarkable. to see this and other conversations with great minds go to our website and conversation with great minds dot com.

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